And then Brooklyn gets so excited about doing anything except sitting at home that she’s quite pliant. Patricia soon has her bathed, her hair blown dry and shiny, a pretty dress buttoned up the back and sweet little white sandals on her feet, if a bit too small. Patricia spends extra time on her own hair and makeup and tosses on some extra jewelry. Brooklyn asks for a car seat when they get in Patricia’s sedan, but a five-year-old can ride with a seatbelt, as far as Patricia is concerned. It was good enough for Chelsea, after all, and she came to no harm.
They wave Patricia through at the club gate, and her heart thrills to be here again, in the place where she holds all the power. The lot is emptier than usual, with most of her cohort gone north or, like Randall, to Europe. She’s kept up with the auction committee, of course, but the world has noticeably slowed down. They have two months still before the rescheduled event, and she’ll have to find Ella to watch Brooklyn so she can dive back into her duties with verve now that everyone’s getting vaccinated. Maybe she’ll even set her sights on her next husband.
Yes, she can turn all this around. She has to start planning her next move.
“This place is fancy,” Brooklyn whispers, and Patricia has to remind her that children only speak when spoken to.
At the front desk, she releases Brooklyn’s preternaturally sticky hand and says, “I believe you have a package for me?”
The girl behind the counter ducks down and pokes around but comes up empty-handed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lane, but we don’t have anything. Who did you talk to?”
“Ms. Green.”
The girl cocks her head.
“Carrie Green,” Patricia adds.
“We don’t have a Carrie Green.”
Patricia’s fingers twitch.
“Carrie Green doesn’t work here?”
“No. Could it have been someone else? We have a Carolyn Goss, but she’s a groundskeeper.”
A terrible, sinking feeling makes Patricia’s chest tight. She holds up her phone. “This is her number.”
The woman shakes her head, only now beginning to look apologetic. “We only call our members through official means, Mrs. Lane.”
“Then I suppose she also neglected to make the lunch reservation I requested?”
The woman flips open the book and runs a finger down the page. “No, ma’am.”
“I see.”
Which is how rich, powerful people say, Oh shit.
“If you’ll excuse me?”
Patricia grabs Brooklyn’s hand and drags her out the door and toward the sedan.
“Ouch! Nana, that hurts!”
“Then move faster,” she snaps. “We need to hurry.”
“I thought we were going out to lunch. Like a tea party, you said.”
Patricia opens the door and struggles to snap the seatbelt over the squirming child.
“Another day, perhaps.”
Because she understands that whoever called her wanted her to come here, which means they wanted her out of the house.
She drives just above the speed limit on the way back, wary for policemen and preparing to lie about Brooklyn needing to urinate, should they stop her. Without the judge’s presence and protection, she’s just as susceptible to tickets as anyone else, and she hates how that makes her feel like she’s already doing something wrong.
When she stops at the guardhouse, waiting for the gates to open, Homer steps out and waves. “Mrs. Lane, do you have a granddaughter, maybe seventeen? Drives an older Honda Civic?”
She stares at him coldly for a moment before her eyes bounce back to the gate, waiting for it to open. She has no idea what kind of car Ella drives, but that doesn’t signify.
“I do.”
“She came by twice, once last night with Greg and once with me this morning. But she wasn’t on the list, so…”
“Add her to the list. Her name is Ella Martin. Call me immediately if she returns.”
And then she’s all but peeling past the gates and toward her house.
On the outside, everything looks totally normal. Maybe she’s just being paranoid?
The car screeches to a halt in the garage, and she jumps out and slams the door.
“Nana!” Brooklyn screams.
Cursing softly, she turns back to help the child out of the car, even though a five-year-old should be able to extricate herself from a seatbelt. Laura Ingalls Wilder was babysitting an infant and cooking with open fire at that age, for crying out loud.
Only once the door to the house is open and she sees that the security system has been disarmed does it occur to her that she—an older woman pulling a young child by the hand—is entering what might be a dangerous situation. She whips out her phone and dials 9-1-1, preparing to hit the CALL button. With the judge no longer on her side, she’s not willing to risk the call unless there’s really an emergency.
“Hello?” she calls into the hallway.
“Is it Ella?” Brooklyn chirps, trying to move past her into the house.
Patricia jerks her back by her arm, gently shoving her into the garage as the child squeaks a protest.
“Stay here. If you hear anything unusual, run.”
“What do you mean?”
Patricia doesn’t have time to explain everything. She holds up a finger to her lips, grabs a mallet from the garage tool bench Miguel once used to fix the lawnmower, slips off her mules, and tiptoes into her own home. It’s silent inside, no whispers or scent of smoke or footsteps on the stairs, nothing that would scare her, just the sturdy march of Randall’s grandfather clock ticking, ticking, ticking.
“Hello?” she calls again, unsure what the protocol for this sort of thing is or what she would do if anyone responded.
To her knowledge, only she, Rosa, Miguel, and Randall know the security code, and while they were in Utah, Randall admitted that he’d forgotten it; he never uses it, anyway. Someone has always been home. There’s no reason anyone else would know it. She didn’t even tell her granddaughters—purposefully kept it from them, in fact. Could this perhaps be an inside job by the security company?
Room by room, Patricia moves through her home, a sense of unease rippling up the back of her neck. Something is very wrong, and she isn’t sure what. Nothing obvious has been taken—not her laptop, sitting conspicuously on the sunroom table, not any of the flatscreen TVs. She doesn’t hear a single sound, and the house feels empty and hollow.
Whoever was here—and someone was definitely here, she can feel it in her bones—was after something very specific. Maybe it was just Randall, stopping by to collect his things and maneuvering her out of the house so he wouldn’t have to deal with her?
He did say he would send Diane.
She hurries upstairs, but Randall’s office appears untouched, as does the closet in the bedroom he keeps for himself. Of course, most of his things were already packed for Iceland. What else could he possibly want?
Everything in the house that’s worth anything—
“Shit,” Patricia murmurs under her breath.
She runs down the hall, heart thumping so hard she can feel it in her ears. She storms past Brooklyn’s room, barely noting the clothes strewn everywhere, tossed out of their bags. In the spare room, the painting hangs open, the empty safe exposed to the world.
And in her own closet, the old bag she’s hidden under her furs is gone.
27.